I agree with Devon's concerns about this. Struts assumes a pretty robust
understanding of the general principles of servlet and JSP programming
(including the intricacies of a web application archive file).
The good news for developers is that all of this level of knowledge is
transferrable, because the underlying specs are used by *any* servlet and
JSP environment, and the various app servers and servlet containers
implement them (pretty much, and getting better :-) the same way. But you
are going to be an unhappy camper if you don't know what
does, or that you have to make session attributes thread safe, or how the
/WEB-INF directory is organized, or ...).
Craig
On Mon, 6 Aug 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > If you wanted to slim this down, and your goal is just to
> > bring them up to speed on Struts, I'd hazard to say that
> > there's much that a Struts developer doesn't ~really~ need
> > to know about Web application development.
>
> Not sure I agree with this. My experience with Struts indicates
> that it is still not robust enough for this kind of thinking.
> I believe that a developer that doesn't have a reasonably deep
> understanding will become very frustrated very quickly. I can't
> tell you the number of times that I've had to dive into the
> source code to answer my questions. When errors occur, a stack
> trace is often all the help you get and that requires you to
> know the software structure intimately. Then there's the lack
> of solid documentation. One can't even buy a book about Struts
> yet to help answer questions. And the fact that the people I
> am teaching aren't native English speakers doesn't help either.
> They would find the volume on this list quite intimidating.
>
> I guess I would agree with you if there were one person in the
> group that knew Struts thoroughly and could help the others
> when problems arose. At the moment, that would be me. But I am
> only contracted here till the end of the year. After that,
> these guys need to be able to go it alone. And I think Struts
> still expects too much expertise and effort from the developer
> to be considered a tool for the average programmer. So my
> philosophy is to try to push them to be a bit beyond average.
>
> In any case, thanks for your comments. I will update my outline.
>
> Devon
>
>
